I think for the most part this was strictly a blowoff.
But about the hair dryers. Before the early '60s I never heard of anyone having a hair dryer at home. Everybody’s mother went to the beauty shop. Rich people went to the beauty shop more often, or more expensive beauty shops. Kids, even little girls with long hair, air-dried.
When my hair was long it took five hours for it to dry. This was if it was loose. I actually slept with my hair rolled around orange juice cans a couple of times, but in the morning it was still damp, so that didn’t work and was not all that comfortable.
The first home hair dryer we had was a giant plastic bonnet with elastic around the edges, attached to something that looked like a modern blowdryer. It said not to use it while you were asleep. I spent hours trying to figure out how you could sleep while using that thing, as it was a, uncomfortable, and b, noisy.
The really high-end home hairdryer was just like a beauty shop contraption, except it didn’t come with a chair. You had to provide the chair.
Both of these worked with hair in rollers. Because of the rollers, it still took a long time. At the beauty shop they had little plastic things to go over your ears so your ears didn’t get red and/or melt off entirely during the process.
Some time around 1970 or thereabouts, some genius figured out that you didn’t actually need the bonnet, you could aim the heat source directly at your hair, and if you brushed your hair while blowing it around with the thing that put out the heat, it would get dry a lot faster. Then came round brush combs to help put some shape in it, and plug-in curlers (for home use; the first ones I ever heard of were called Carmen Curlers, and I first heard of them from the big sister of a friend of mine who’d gone to school in Switzerland for a year). If you didn’t have to sit under the dryer for an hour and a half, then you had the time to spend heating up the electric curlers.
Curling irons were around in the late 1800s, and my grandmother used them. They were not electric.
Some site says that before hair dryers were invented in the '20s women reversed the vacuum cleaner. Hah! I think the women in my family were still beating the carpets outside, with carpet beaters, but maybe they were slow. I know my grandmother didn’t live anywhere with electricity until the late '20s.
And we thought we had it bad.
In high school, I offended one of the black girls by asking how often she washed her hair. I asked because I sat behind her in English and she had the same piece of lint in approximately the same place in her hairdo for…weeks, it seemed like.
The answer was: none too often. Some years later a college friend had me help her do her hair, and it was quite an ordeal. Wash. Dry. Apply smelly toxic stuff. Do some other stuff. Apply oil. Apply hot comb. It took, literally, all day. She did it approximately every three weeks. My hair would have disintegrated under this regime. Not long after she decided to just let it go nappy (her word).
I could sure see why the black girls didn’t hang out at the pool in the summer. You’d be in terror that a stray drop of water would undo all this processing. It was apparently like having to give yourself a home permanent every time you washed your hair.
